WWDC Student Scholarships are up!

Apple has announced the Student Scholarships for WWDC and the WWDC Student Page is up now. To find out details and apply for a scholarship you need only go to http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/students/

WWDC 2008

So after a long time of wondering when Apple will ever announce WWDC it has finally been announced and will be from June 9 - 13 in Moscone West in San Francisco. I will be making it out to WWDC this year and it seems everybody from the AmesMUG and Des Moines CocoaHeads will be making it out as well. Already on twitter i've seen many developers start scheduling their flights and hotels.

iPhone SDK
The big addition to this years conference is the addition of the iPhone track and obviously the discussion of the iPhone SDK and how to design, code, debug & deploy your iPhone applications to the world. From Apples WWDC iPhone Page:

iPhone OS is the world’s most advanced mobile operating system providing developers with an amazing platform for creating the next generation of innovative mobile applications. Choose from a wide range of sessions offered in the iPhone development track and gain the knowledge you need to develop captivating native and web-based applications for iPhone and iPod touch.

Undoubtedly the public iPhone SDK will probably be released to the world at WWDC alongside the iPhone 2.0 firmware allowing people to run these apps on their iPhones and iPod Touches. This could only be sweeter if the Pragmatic Coders: Core Animation book was released about this time as well (btw I haven't had a chance to read all of it yet, but so far what i've seen is very good. I won't say much more on it right now, because I want to read all of it before posting any reviews and I wouldn't wanna spoil the fun of getting a beta copy for you :)

Students
If you're a student there isn't much you can do about WWDC right now unless you wanna pay the price to go. Apple (as always) does offer student scholarships to help students get a chance to go. As far as I am aware they have not announced anything yet in the way for student scholarships. The WWDC Students page and WWDC Students Rules page all just do redirects to Apples WWDC page currently. Just keep following Apple news and this blog and when it's announced you'll know when the student scholarship is available.

Is it worth it?
WWDC is absolutely worth it for anybody interested in developing apps for Mac OS X or the iPhone/iPod touch or if your just working with Mac's in IT. You get to watch some great sessions and get excellent tips on development from Apple themselves. Additionally you get to meet up and network with other Mac developers including the ones who develop the very apps you use. Additionally there are parties and gatherings by various groups and developers for all sorts of purposes which are worth checking out.

I will be there and probably will be posting to twitter (as best I can without breaking my NDA) where I am and where I am going. So if your there and you see me don't be afraid to say hi and talk. I wish I could do the same for other developers. I totally chickened out of talking to Wil Shipley and Aaron Hillegass partially because im just naturally shy, even though they are the reason I am able to develop apps on Mac OS X right now. If I can i'd like to try and say hi to the above mentioned Wil Shipley & Aaron HIllegass in addtion to people like Scott Stevenson, Wolf Rentzsch, Matt Gemmell, Gus Mueller and too many other developers to list off here individually.

Speaking of other developers my newest hero is Daniel Jalkut who makes the excellent MarsEdit blog application, which I am using from here on out to do my blog posts when I realized how much time I saved by doing posts through MarsEdit than through the web. I promise I will really resist to do shameless plugs in the future, but I figure something that makes it easier for me to get information to you is worth mentioning just once.

Conclusion
If you have the resources and a free week available then I would strongly encourage you to go and enjoy a week in San Francisco with all the other Mac developers out there. You'll have a good time, do some networking and learn a lot of development tips in the process. I'll see you there.

DM Cocoaheads Tonight: Run Loops

Eric Roccasecca of Startly fame will be doing a guide of Run Loops

reposted from http://cocoaheads.org/us/DesMoinesIowa/index.html

The next CocoaHeads: Thursday March 13, 2008 07:00 PM CST at DMACC's West Des Moines campus - Ask front desk for Room #.
Directions:
DMACC's West Des Moines campus is located at 5959 Grand Ave in West Des Moines [Google Maps][DMACC's directions]

Agenda:
Run Loops demystified! Join us as Eric discusses the finer points of run loops and how they manage to irritate and amaze simultaneously.

There's also been a request to discuss bindings. While this topic deserves its own meeting (which will happen soon), we'll go over the "basics" again with the time we have left after the presentation.

Distributed Denial of iPhone SDK

So the iPhone SDK is finally here. I'm glad (but not surprised) that we can download the SDK, but can't actually ship our apps for while. The servers still seem a bit glitchy as Daniel Jalkut put it "We are experiencing a distributed denial of iPhone SDK." [via twitter]. In a nutshell, that's what we did once the event was over, developers the world over practically DDOS'd apples servers.

One interesting thought that came up as I was talking to one of my friends on IM is that many people have bitched about Objective-C and it's "brackets" and about Mac OS X as well, now people are forced to get on board and use Mac OS X and Objective-C. Sure you could presumably use a hackintosh, but no matter what you can't get past the fact that you have to learn Objective-C and be brave or as I put it in the IM conversation "this SDK now seems like an excuse for them to say "hey you didn't wanna learn Objective-C, now you do bitches! suck it up!'".

it'll be interesting how many windows developers buy a mac today and in the days to come :) I'm downloading the SDK right now and if nothing else I wanna connect iCal To Do's to the iPhone.

My Wish list of apps for the iPhone really only has a few things on it right now

1. OmniGroup if your reading this PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put OmniFocus on the iPhone! Especially with Core Location you have such a great opportunity here to develop a killer app for GTD/OmniFocus users

2. Real IM on the iPhone

3. Games, the web games I've tried thus far are OK, but much could be improved

Beyond that surprise me people, make me want things I didn't even know I wanted!

While I am at it, the secret seems to be out so I might as well share, my Twitter account is now active again and I'm definitely staying with it. I'm here http://twitter.com/CocoaSamurai/ for those of you fellow twitters.

Additionally I am giving some thought to moving this blog to Wordpress. I guess one thing I dislike is that no pre-made template has ever satisfied me and while wordpress isn't perfect there is more than lets say 8 that Blogger seems to offer. My ultimate dream though is to make a Samurai/Xcode/Objective-C code theme that's simplistic and yet detailed, like you painted it with a brush, but I don't know any graphic designers (that's why the icons on my apps aren't so hot.) The move to wordpress would have tradeoffs in any case and it's just a thought at this point.

Also today I bought cocoasamurai.com which will forward to cocoasamurai.blogspot.com. Eventually in time I hope to drop all other urls and have everything just be on cocoasamurai.com

Lastly I'm finishing up the Xcode Shortcut list modified for 8.5 x 11 pages, firstly though I am frantically trying to finish up my time consuming project and assignments for school. By the end of this weekend I should have it posted here.

One more thing... expect some new tutorials in a totally new format here in the future ;)